


Ronin

by thestarsjustblinkforus



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Post-snap, Pre-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), clint barton is not okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:14:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27811318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thestarsjustblinkforus/pseuds/thestarsjustblinkforus
Summary: She tries to contact him.Over and over, in every way she can think of. Calls to his cell, Laura’s cell, burner phones, comm units.“Please, Clint. I need to know if you’re alive.”He almost answers more than once, but ultimately can’t bring himself to do it. To pick up, to text back. Too grief-stricken, too shell-shocked.But he listens to her messages. Over and over again.At first calm, and then increasingly less so. The fourth and fifth messages full-blown unrestrained naked panic. And another where she’s crying, begging for it not to be true, for him, for them, not to be gone, not to be dead.He doesn’t look at his phone again after that one.Instead, he prepares. He plans. He tracks.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 2
Kudos: 29





	Ronin

She tries to contact him.

Over and over, in every way she can think of. Calls to his cell, Laura’s cell, burner phones, comm units.

_“Please, Clint. I need to know if you’re alive.”_

He almost answers more than once, but ultimately can’t bring himself to do it. To pick up, to text back. Too grief-stricken, too shell-shocked.

But he listens to her messages. Over and over again.

At first calm, and then increasingly less so. The fourth and fifth messages full-blown unrestrained naked panic. And another where she’s crying, begging for it not to be true, for him, for them, not to be gone, not to be dead.

He doesn’t look at his phone again after that one.

Instead, he prepares. He plans. He tracks.

But when he leaves on his first mission, he takes the cell with him and when he’s done with the cartel, he sits alone in a half-forgotten safehouse that smells like old blood and he turns it on.

There are new messages.

It takes him another month before he listens to them.

And when he does… it’s Nat like he’s never heard her before. Nat, pouring herself into message after message. Small confessionals, spoken quietly in her low, husky voice. Personal things, some of which he knew or suspected. Some things that would feel like trespassing if not for her lifting the caution tape, taking down the _Do Not Enter_ sign.

Because she thinks he’s dead. Snapped. A pile of dust on his Missouri farm.

But she still called. Over and over again.

**_“It’s Clint. You know what to do.”_ **

_“I don’t. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know anything anymore.”_

**_*click*_ **

**_“It’s Clint. You know what to do."_ **

“I…”

***click***

**_“It’s Clint. You know what to do.”_ **

_“… I just needed to hear your voice today…”_

***click***

**_“It’s Clint. You know what to do.”_ **

_“I’m running the Avengers now. Effectively. Tony and Pepper followed your lead… with the whole… retirement thing… They have a really nice house… in the woods - a cabin. You’d love it. There’s a lake for fishing... They had a kid. Morgan. She’s really smart… Reminds me so much of Lilah…”_

Soft quick breath, her voice shaky when she speaks again and his heart clenches thinking of his daughter and he almost deletes this one too, but he keeps listening as she tells him about the others, where they are, what they’re doing. How they’re coping. How they’re not coping.

**_“It’s Clint. You know what to do.”_ **

_“I’m ah… not doing too great here... I…”_

***click***

He starts saving the remaining messages to listen to. After every mission he completes he digs the cell out, punches in the code with his bloodied hands and he closes his eyes and he listens in the dark to her voice.

**_“It’s Clint. You know what to do.”_ **

_“I used to be good at alone. It felt… safe. I used to believe that that was… my natural state. That that was maybe the one thing they didn’t do to me. The one thing that maybe I knew about myself… I wasn’t… good at making friends. Trust was punished but I’ve always understood that and never did anyway even before the… the training… And then S.H.E.I.L.D. happened…”_ one of those quick sharp breaths that he’s become familiar with, the sound of her trying not to cry, even when she can, when no one would know, the sound of her fighting against it. Only that one time she didn’t. That one message he did delete. Her sobbing his name and _please, please, please answer…Clint... “You happened. And I didn’t want to be alone anymore. Even when I was… knowing… knowing you were out there… that you would be there when I came back from a mission… knowing you would comeback… You changed me, Clint. You made me feel like a real person. Like I had a place in the world. And that it was by your side… You and me holding our own against the whole world…”_

***click***

**_“It’s Clint. You know what to do.”_ **

_“I miss you.”_

**_*click*_ **

**_“It’s Clint. You know what to do.”_ **

_“Do you remember that time… In New Mexico… we drank too much… ended up dancing on that veranda with all the… the string lights… I said you were a good dancer and you laughed and said you didn’t know what you were doing, you were just following my lead… You spun me and I ah… “lost my balance” so you’d catch me… and you did…”_

He remembers. He remembers neither of them were as tipsy as they were pretending to be. He remembers.

_“I almost asked you to come to my room that night. I wanted you to. I thought maybe you wanted to too… I knew you wouldn’t… And I… cared… for you even more because of it, even as I wanted so badly for you to… I think about that all the time… and other times… how we never… because you’re a good man. You… you were a good man. Honest and loyal… and… loving. You taught me a lot about that… About love and… doing the right thing for it… because of it… So, thank you, Clint.”_

**_*click*_ ** ****

**_“It’s Clint. You know what to do.”_ **

_“I would do anything to bring you back. To bring them back. Anything.”_

***click***

**_“It’s Clint. You know what to do.”_ **

_“I never told you. That I loved you. I think you knew. I hope you knew. But I did. And I just need to say it out loud even though I didn’t when it mattered. I love you, Clint. Always.”_

That last message, dated two months ago.

He wonders if something happened, if she…

His heart clenches hard in his chest and he almost calls, just to hear her voice again, even if it's just a recording.

But he doesn’t.

Instead, he plans more plans, he kills more and more of the deserving. He rages and he slices, a sword more personal, more brutal. You have to look someone in the eye when you kill them with a sword and it’s the only thing he’s getting approaching satisfaction even though it’s short-lived and will never be enough.

He lets loose every nasty brutish instinct he never knew he possessed and he saves the messages, he saves her voice in the battered, blood-stained cell phone that he keeps tucked against his chest and he goes back to the beginning and listens to them again, kill after kill.

_“I love you, Clint.”_

No new messages.

_“Always.”_

No new messages.

He could never call her now. Even if he knew she was still alive he could never face her now after what he’s done.

And yet some small part of him whispers, _she may be the only one who can understand the weight of all of this blood…_

She may be the only one who could forgive him for what he’s done, understand what he’s lost.

Sometimes he dreams of finding her, of her finding him. Her arms around him.

He dreams of her holding him instead of his wife. Because Laura would never understand. If by some miracle she were alive and it was all a misunderstanding… she would never look at him the same way.

He listens to the messages again.

Remembers even though it’s long been deleted, Natasha sobbing _please, please, please Clint…_

One night he wakes up in a cold sweat to a nightmare of her lips twisted in disgust, her eyes, sad and disappointed and _I thought you were a good man…_

And then her face is Laura’s face, her mouth Laura’s mouth, twisted and _I thought you were a good man…_

He dreams of Lilah, and Cooper and Nate and he vomits on the floor and staggers into the night with his sword unsheathed.

He hides the cell behind a loose brick in the safehouse in Tokyo and he leaves it there.

A year later he identifies a new target, a conglomerate of human traffickers and he lays them to waste. He’s a better fighter now than he ever was. More ruthless. More reckless. Better because he doesn’t care. He is fearless now that he has nothing to live for and as he brings down his sword to end the last man, he feels her.

A prickling between his shoulder blades.

_Nat..._

The body slumps at his feet.

He cleans his sword and her soft, husky voice says, “ _Clint_.”

She waits for him, she has been waiting for him for years but he can't turn around, he can't...

He thinks about running. He thinks about all the places he could hide but then her hand is on his shoulder gently turning him towards her and then he's crumpling helplessly into her arms, his sword falling from his hand, the harsh clang of it echoing down the empty neon corridor.

She takes him to the Tokyo safehouse and he thinks of the cell phone he hid in the wall. Thinks about telling her he received the messages, every single one of them and that he’s thought about New Mexico too. That he loves her too.

She takes his mask off him, looks up at his face and he can’t meet her eyes. She takes his gear from him and he lets her, she turns on the shower filling the room with steam and heat and he’s shivering, she’s shivering. She unbuckles him, she unpeels him, strips him down to skin, her eyes catching on the tattoo on his arm stretching shoulder to wrist, her hand briefly rising between them to touch, but she stops herself, she steps back, nods at the shower, _go ahead_ and he does, following orders for the first time in years.

He steps into the rolling steam, steps under the spray, hot enough to scald and he makes it hotter, he breathes deep and he stares down at the water swirling down the drain until it’s no longer red and he doesn’t know what to do next.

_You could try getting out of the shower, shithead…_

When he opens the door, she’s sitting on the couch. She looks smaller than he remembers her ever being. Fragile. Her head is in her hands and when she lifts it her face is blotchy, her eyes red-rimmed and he has never seen her cry. Heard her, yes, on that call… so many calls trying not to and then that one… _please, please, please_ _Clint_ and he comes to her as she stands, as she quickly wipes her eyes he comes to her and he wraps his arms around her the way she did him and she clings to him, her nails sinking in, but she doesn’t make a sound and when she lifts her head he kisses her.

He kisses her because it seems like the only right thing left in the world, the only thing that doesn’t hurt, that feels like living, like breathing.

She kisses him back and they fall down to the couch, the only piece of furniture in the room, an island, an oasis, soft and accepting and she tugs the towel away, he unzips her, he unpeels her, he strips her down to skin and he sinks into her with a sigh, a groan, a cry that she echoes.

It feels like being alive. For the first time in years, he feels alive, he wants to live.

And he wants Ronin to be the dream, the nightmare, not this, not this...

But he wakes up alone.

He wakes up and he is alone.

He finds the chink in the wall and claws at it, leaving his blood on the bricks.

The cell phone is still there. She's still there.

He tucks it back into his pocket and he plans the next target.

And the next.

And the next.

And the next.


End file.
